We are now maintaining an online calendar of AWS Events at eventful.com . This calendar contains a worldwide list of upcoming talks by members of the AWS Developer Relations Team. It also contains an entry for each weekly chat session. You can visit the calendar on a regular basis, or you can simply subscribe to the RSS feeds or visit the calendar to subscribe using iCal.

Soapui is an open source Java 1.5 tool (with a Swing UI) for inspecting and testing SOAP-based web services. It supports WSDL importing, request generation, an unlimited number of requests per operation, multiple service endpoints for the same service, validation, three types of authentication, and background processing.

While this is not directly related to AWS, it is a perfect example of how open standards (e.g. XML and HTTP), common formats (e.g. RSS), generous licensing, and direct person to person collaboration can take an idea from concept to production in a matter of weeks.

Through an odd twist of fate, the two Amazonians involved (Dewitt Clinton and Jeff Barr) were once colleagues on the same team at Microsoft. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

Recently I spent sometime talking
with Amir of Txtfo, for those of you who
don’t know who or what Txtfo are, there are a company with a great idea; namely
to allow you to use SMS technology available on all mobile phones to get
information from Amazon. This information can be anything that’s supported by
AWS.

How does it work?

Using Txtfo you can
send a simple text and instantly search on amazon.co.uk for any Book, CD or DVD
anytime, anywhere. It’s a nice application as it gives the customer more
control over their purchase, as they can now tell availability and pricing from
Amazon.co.uk all via SMS. The Customer also receives an email, so if they want
to, the next time they go online, they can continue the purchase process

With the long run in to Christmas
looming on the horizon, I can see this application being heavily used, it works
well with word of mouth. Someone gives me an idea for a present I can check it out now, if there is a long waiting
list, no problem Amazon.co.uk can take
the order and fulfill it when the product become available. No more waiting around or trying to remember
a present idea for me

For those of you interested in
finding out more about txtfo, check out the following:

With all the debate about SOAP vs
REST I thought it would be worth a few column inches pointing out the
differences between the two.

REST is an architectural style. SOAP is a message format.
With SOAP there is a well defined processing and extensibility model. The two
are not directly comparable in my opinion. The confusions comes as both
approaches (for lack of a better word) are used to deliver web services.

In the future I would hope to see both REST and SOAP being offered
(as they are in our very own Amazon Web Services AWS), there are peculiar
advantages for each approach.

There is the simplicity, of REST with its HTTP verbs
allowing for simple querying of a distant resource, and the coming
transactional model support in SOAP, that will allow for far more complicated
activities via Web Services.

In fact using SOAP 1.2 many of the
RESTful features people so love (e.g. URI interface) can be combined with a SOAP
payload, I think this is the beginning of an beautiful friendship.

REST’s straight forward nature
offers low barriers of entry into using web services, this has resulted in the
typical take up being 80% skewed in favor of REST implementations by our own AWS.

I tend to think of REST as an
introduction to the world of web services, and introduction that’s mostly good
enough, especially for now, but one where it may need to be combined with some
of the heavy weight features being built into SOAP for future applications.

My advice is pick the best one for
you, but keep an eye on both as I am certain they have a bright future together

Robert Scoble of Microsoft's Channel 9 recently paid a visit to Amazon's Seattle office to interview Jeff Barr and Steve Rabuchin of Amazon's Developer Relations team. In this 19 minute video, you can see how developers are using Amazon's Web Services in a variety of ways. You can also learn about the joint Amazon/Microsoft Developer Contest, which features $5,000 in prizes.